[Yenser is American poet, educator, and critic. Here, he acknowledges that the fifty-four poems in The Wild Iris generate a complete sequence; nevertheless, he asserts that the use of many voices is a problematic aspect of her work in the volume.]

Louise Glück's The Wild Iris characteristically contains no poem longer than thirty lines, and many of the poems gleam with the knifing ironies and the burnished paradoxes that have always marked her work, while some show a new visionary fire; but there is a strong sense in which this, her sixth volume, is really a single, rhizomic sequence, a complex structure that we can now see has been evolving at least since her third volume, Descending Figure, and which is embodied, in a less integrated form, in her fifth, Ararat. Glück wrote these fifty-four poems in ten weeks, a period that lends the book an organizational element: the poems in its first half are set mostly in the spring, while those in its second half occur in deepening summer. At the same time, Glück moves from morning to evening, since the lyrics in the poet's voice in the first half are mostly called "Matins," while the corresponding poems in the last half are "Vespers." Taken together, these poems from the poet's point of view constitute one of three kinds of poem in Wild Iris. Poems of a second kind see things from the vantage of nature—or, to be more specific, flowers and other vegetation in the family garden. The remaining poems, whose titles usually designate a time of day, a season, or a weather condition, are in the voice of God—here a "father," a "master," a figure of "authority," and primarily Judaic, regardless of the crepuscular Catholic coloring of "Matins" and "Vespers." The presence of this third point of view puts Glück's compelling sequence in a venerable and recently quite vigorous but ever startling genre that reaches in English from George Herbert through Blake and Yeats to John Berryman and Ted Hughes and James Merrill.

The jacket copy's exigent prose tells us that the volume creates "an impassioned polyphonic exchange among the god 'who disclose[s] / virtually nothing,' human beings who 'leave / signs of feeling / everywhere,' and a garden where 'whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice.'" In fact, things are both more and less complicated than that. For instance, it is precisely "polyphonic exchange" that never occurs. The different speakers usually don't hear and never truly understand or respond directly to one another, and they rarely (if significantly) speak in unison—and their different isolations give the sequence much of its reverberating pathos. As God puts it in "Sunset," when addressing the poet: "My great happiness / is the sound your voice makes / calling to me even in despair; my sorrow / that I cannot answer you / in speech you accept as mine."

As that passage will suggest, Glück's strategy entails certain nagging epistemological difficulties. For one, God speaks to the poet in words that she cannot understand but can somehow transcribe in the language that she writes and that we read. Or can we elude that paradox by drawing a hard distinction between the "poet" and the human "speaker" of the "Matins" and "Vespers"—in which case, the invisible "poet" knows the language of God but her "speaker" does not? If so, as the dust jacket puts it mighty casually, we have here a "ventriloquism," whereby the poet throws her voice into God and garden as well as into her own stand-in. Or perhaps we are to infer God as the source of all voices and the rest of the speakers as dummies. But the speaker in one of the "Matins," for her part, finds the proposition that God "must be all things" entirely "useless." Maybe we should not posit a source at all; maybe we can know only that we are enmeshed in a network of desiring voices deaf to one another. The possibilities are intriguing—the more so because each of the points of view is contradictory. Thus while God claims transcedent attributes, he is ordinarily all too human (petty, pitying, vindictive, impotent). Similarly, the voices from the garden are sometimes imperious and unfeeling ("The Hawthorn Tree" and "Lanium",) sometimes wonderfully passionate ("Trillium" and "The Jacob's Ladder").

My best guess is that we are dealing with conflicting projections of a single, solipsistic, human sensibility, to which each moment has its own flaring, lyrical life and transitory, dramatic truth. Something like this motivates Berryman's "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" and Merrill's "From the Cupola" (The Changing Light at Sandover, by contrast, resembles Paradise Lost in that God is a character in an epic pageant, rather than another importunate lyric presence), but in each of these other poems the conflict is sharply defined and part of the crucial issue from the outset. It is not clear to me that such a psychomachia is sustained in The Wild Iris—though I must say that Glück's marvelous final poem brings the different voices together in a fashion reminiscent of the closes of those earlier twentieth-century masterpieces and that it works best for me when I imagine that it springs from and momentarily resolves such a drama. Here is the last stanza:

Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.

"We," exactly. The title "The White Lilies" suggests that this voice is that of the flowers, speaking to the poet/ gardener; but the lilies symbolize resurrection and thus blur into the incarnate god, who could be speaking to the poet; while the elated poet herself might deservedly feel that this part of her has been planted like a bulb in the autumn by a gardener/god. In any event, The Wild Iris is a perennial.